Imagine walking up to someone and asking them a simple math question. Instead of answering, they burst into tears, run away, or tell you the answer is too personal to share.

Now imagine that person doesn’t exist. They’re a character in your dream, a product of your own brain.

Almost every night, we interact with people who exist only in our minds. They talk, argue, laugh, and sometimes behave in ways that catch us entirely by surprise. But here's a fascinating question: If our brains are creating these characters, why don't we know what they're going to say? How can our own brain surprise us every single night?

A handful of wonderfully creative studies have explored this question by asking lucid dreamers—people who know they are dreaming while still asleep—to strike up conversations with their imaginary companions and report what happened.

In an early study, one dreamer asked a character whether it had consciousness. The response? “I am sure that I have a consciousness, but I doubt if you have one, because you ask me such stupid questions!” Cheeky!

Dream Characters Are Terrible at Math (and Sometimes Very Sensitive About It)

In a 2010 pilot study, researchers asked lucid dreamers to seek out a wise “guide” in their dream to help them tackle puzzles or invent metaphors1.

The dream guides were not exactly logic champions: They supplied just one correct answer in 11 encounters involving logical puzzles. However, their advice on creative tasks was more promising. When asked to produce metaphors for unlikely scenes like a child playing in a cemetery, a dream guide responded, “a flower growing on waste land.” Not bad for a made-up character. The authors summarized their pilot study with an intriguing conclusion: Dream characters may be more helpful with imaginative associations than with step-by-step logic.

To follow up on this idea, the researchers conducted another study in which they instructed lucid dreamers to ask their characters if they could solve simple arithmetic problems2.

Here again, dream characters were not particularly gifted mathematicians. They got only about a third of their responses correct, even struggling with calculations as simple as 3 4.

But their reactions to the questions were even more interesting.........

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